West Virginia head coach Rich Rodriguez wants toughness and competition in his football program.
It’s become the two defining traits of his time as a head coach and the roots could go as far back to his high school days at North Marion.
That’s because the school was formed by the consolidation of several small local area high schools including Barrackville, Fairview, Mannington, Farmington and Monongah.
Rodriguez, a Grant Town native, attended Fairview and while there was initial concern about losing the small town high schools and opportunities in the communities, he was excited for the challenge.
“I was like this was the greatest thing ever,” he recalled.
Rodriguez was one of around 150 players that competed for a spot on the team with many of them starters at their previous schools. But the competition whittled that number down as players weren’t accustomed to that type of challenge under then head coach Roy Michael.
That provided a good lesson for Rodriguez under the hard-nosed Michael and helped to set a basis for him that was only further reinforced through his experiences in college.
“That’s why I have a hard time that bail on competition, I want guys that embrace it not run away from it,” Rodriguez said.
Technology has helped many things in the realm of coaching, which is a good thing in order to learn more about different schemes and plays that can work but sometimes you can almost do too much. And because of that it is often easy to forget about the most important aspect of teaching the fundamentals.
Rodriguez understands his job is to keep exploring what’s out there in order to add some of those things that can help but not forgetting the fundamentals on how to block, tackle, footwork and everything else.
“To me, when we’ve had success we’ve been mostly simpler, but we’ve been really good fundamentally with really good players and we can’t lose that,” he said.
Rodriguez believes his offensive system largely stems from his roots on top of the fact that he has no patience, even joking that the 30 minutes he spends with the media answering questions is more than he shows in any other aspect of his life.
“Just so you know,” he said.
While things started with Rodriguez throwing the football at Glenville, it quickly evolved more into a run-based spread offense where he wants to force teams to make them throw the football. That toughness is something that also aligns with the people of the state and his background growing up the son of a coal miner.
“This is a tough blue collar, people that live in this state they aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty,” he said.
Rodriguez has had games where his team has thrown for 500 yards and eclipsed that mark on the ground and if you asked him which one he’d prefer the answer is simple.
“Both of them are pretty good but if you run for 500 on somebody its program demoralizing and it’s the worst thing ever if somebody runs for 300, 400, 500 yards on you as a coach you’re just like I got steam rolled,” he said.
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